Published in 4 volumes between 1750 and 1756, an extrapolation and adaptation of the English edition of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (General Dictionary Historical and Critical, London, 1734?1741, 10 vols).

Denis
Diderot,
Prospectus

The Prospectusfor the Encyclopédie was published in October.

“Let posterity say when opening our dictionary: such was then the state of the sciences and fine arts. Let them add their discoveries to those we have catalogued and let the history of the human mind and its productions go from age to age until the most far-off centuries...Let us do for the centuries to come that which we are sorry the past centuries did not do for us...”

Charles-Pinot
Duclos,
Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle

Novelist, historian and essayist, in 1775 Duclos became secretary of the Academie Française. Although sympathetic towards the Encyclopédists he thought Diderot a violent fanatic and used his influence to keep him out of the Academy.

Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle is “a brillant essay by . . . a philosophe and a first-rate observer of his society and times”. (Gay, The Enlightenment: an Interpretation, vol 1, p.435)

Duclos thought that the “science of manners” - the critical observation of social conduct - proved that the eighteenth century was undergoing a revolution in behaviour. “The taste for literature, science, and the arts has insensibly increased, and has reached a point where those who do not have it, affect it”. (135)

“Those who live a hundred miles from the capital, are a century away from it in their modes of thinking and acting.”(13)

Nicholas
Foster,
The Horrid Rebellion in Barbabos

Frederick II,
Oeuvres de Philosophe de Sanssouci

Françoise de
Graffigny,
C‚nie

Drama in which an orphaned girl discovers that her governess is in fact her mother.

David
Hume,
On Miracles

“A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”

Samuel
Johnson,
The Rambler

The Ramblerwas published twice a week from 20 March 1750 to 17 March 1752. In five numbers alone Johnson received assistance from friends, and one of these, written by Richardson, is said to have been the only one to have gained a wide circulation. Generally circulation never exceeded 500, though ten editions were published during Johnson's lifetime, with editions also appearing in Scotland and Ireland.

Alain-René
Lesage,
Le diable boiteux (as The Devil upon Crutches)

The novel was translated into English by Tobias Smollett.

Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing,
Gendanken über Herrnhuter

“Man was made to act, not to split hairs”.

Jean-François
Marmontel,
Cléopâtre

Pierre Louis Moreau de
Maupertuis,
Essai de cosmologie

After the publication of the Essai Maupertuis became involved in arguments with Samuel Konig, Haller and with Voltaire who satirized him in his Micromegas (1752).

Samuel
Richardson,
Meditations Collected from the Sacred Books; And adapted to the different Stages of a Deep Distress; Gloriously surmounted by Patience, Piety, and Recognition. Being those mentioned in the History of Clarissa as drawn up by her for her own Use

Only two copies of this work have survivied.

Bishop
Sherlock,
Letter from the Lord Bishop of London to the Clergy and People of London on the Occasion of the late Earthquakes

A famous pastoral letter, which Hume had occasion to refer to with some amusement, became the best seller of the century; over a hundred thousand copies were sold and given away. In his Natural History of Religion Hume reminded his readers that the saying "Ignorance is the mother of Devotion" had become proverbial in his time.

Anne-Robert Jacques
Turgot,
Tableau philosophique des progrés

The Discours sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain was one of two Latin discourses Turgot delivered on his election as a prior to the Sorbonne.

“Self-interest, ambition, vainglory perpetually change the face of the world, inundate the earth with blood; and, in the midst of their ravages, mœurs grow milder, the human mind is enlightened, isolated nations approach one another; finally, commerce and politics unite all parts of the globe and the totality of mankind, through alternations of calm and agitation, good and evil, marches continuously, though with slow steps, toward a greater perfection.”

“The knowledge of nature and of the truth are as infinite as they are. The arts, whose object it is to please us, are limited as we are. Ceaselessly, time hatches new discoveries in the sciences; but poetry, painting, music, have a fixed point determined by the spirit of language, the imitation of nature, the limited sensitivity of our organs; they reach this point with slow steps and cannot go beyond it. The great men of the century of Augustus reached it, and they are still our models.”

“Many men have won battles and conquered provinces, but few have written a work as perfect as the preface to the Encyclopedia.” (Frederick the Great)

The Discours consisted of a philosophical, historical and cultural justification for the Encyclopédie. This first volume of the Encyclopédie was published in June and consisted of 900 double-column folio pages which only covered the letter A. Publication of the remaining volumes followed at intervals until 1765. They amounted to a total of seventeen volumes of text, consisting of up to about twenty million words, and eleven volumes of plates. The full title of this work was Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers par une societe de gens de lettres.

“Experiments will always fall short and systems will always go too far, experience walking step by step and the spirit of system always going in leaps and bounds.” (From Diderot’s article, ‘Animal’ in Vol 1 of the Encyclopédie).

John
Brown,
Essay on the Characteristics of Lord Shaftesbury

Brown was a clergyman, poet and playwright. In the Essay he defended utilitarianism and extolled the virtues of state education. In addition to criticizing Shaftesbury?s Characteristics Brown also attacked Hume's view of disinterested pleasure in ?Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature?. Garrick appeared in his two plays Barbarossa (1754) and Athelstan (1756). Brown was invited by Catherine II to advise her on education. However, illness prevented him from going to Russia. He committed suicide on 23 September, 1766.

Clayton was a protégé of Samuel Clarke and found protection in the court of George II. He was awarded three Irish bishoprics. The Essay provoked a renewal of the Arian controversy. In 1753 Clayton published a pamphlet criticising the work of Hume and Bolingbroke entitled Some thoughts on self-love, innate-ideas, free-will, taste, sentiment, liberty and necessity, &c. occasioned by reading Mr. Hume?s works, and the short treatise written in French by Lord Bolingbroke, on compassion. Together with a few remarks on the genuine sequel, ? In a letter to a friend. By the author of the Essay on spirit.

Denis
Diderot,
Lettre sur les sourds et muets (Letter on the Deaf and Dumb: for the Use of those who Hear and Speak)

This short work, published in February, on language and aesthetics formed a companion volume to the Letter on the Blind of 1749. A few weeks later, Diderot published a second edition, containing some “additions” in answer to objections raised by a woman friend of his named Mlle de la Chaux. The story of this young woman, translator of David Hume, is told in Diderot’s This Is Not a Story. She died in 1755. Her translation of various essays by Hume appeared under the title Essais sur le commerce, le luxe, l’argent, (Amsterdam, 1752-3).

Henry
Fielding,
Amelia

Fielding's last novel is centered on corruption and injustice in the penal system.

Ferdinando
Galiani,
Della Moneta (On Money)

Thomas
Gray,
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

The poem was completed in 1750 and Gray sent it to Horace Walpole who insisted that it should be published.

Stephen
Hales,
The Wisdom and Goodness of God in the Formation of Man

Sermon published by the Royal College of Physicians.

James
Harris,
Hermes: Or a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar

Eliza
Haywood,
The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

Aaron
Hill,
A Collection of Letters

Published posthumously. Hill knew Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, John Gay, who Hill employed on his periodical The British Apollo, the critic John Dennis, John Dyer, who wrote Grongar Hill, Richard Savage, Nathan Tate, the poet laureate, and Edward Young.

Henry
Home,
Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion

Defended the doctrinne of innate ideas and offended certain Presbyterian ministers by suggesting that God had implanted in the human mind a belief in free will, though without allowing actual freedom. Home comments on the work of David Hume throughout the volume, mostly regarding Hume?s view of belief, personal identity, causality, morality and ?Of a Particular Providence.?

David
Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

Based oo book 3 of the Treatise and published in November 1751 Hume wrote the Enquiry between 1749 and 1751 when he was staying with his brother at Ninewells. Hume considered it to be his finest work. “In my own opinion (who ought not to judge on that subject) it is of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best: it came unnoticed and unobserved into the world.” (Hume, in his autobiography) A German translation appeared in 1756.

David
Hume,
The Petition of the Grave and Venerable Bellmen (or Sextons) of the Church of Scotland

A Petition in which Hume opposed the attempt early in 1750 of the General Assembly of the Church Scotland to increase the salaries of their ministers. Hume's brother was a member of the landed gentry, the group who who have been obliged to cover the costs. In a satirical vein Hume proposed that bell-ringers and grave diggers should also be given salary increases.

Maupertius was President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. The Dissertatio first appeared under the pseudonym of Baumann. It appeared in French in 1754 under the title Essai sur la formation des corps organises, and then under the title Système de la nature in the 1756 edition of Maupertius’s Oeuvres. It was a work of major importance in the development of the theory of evolution, “the first complete formulation of a general theory of transformism”, (Diderot).

Maupertius’s ideas regarding the self-organizing capacity of matter and the “prototype” which undergoes “successive metamorphoses” occupied an important place in Diderot’s Pensees sur l’interpretation de la nature.

Julien Offroy de La
Mettrie,
L’Art de jour

Julien Offroy de La
Mettrie,
Le Petit Homme à longue queue

Julien Offroy de La
Mettrie,
Vénus métaphysique

Julien Offroy de La
Mettrie,
Medical Works

Johann Jakob
Moser,
Deutsches Staatsarchiv

Thirteen volumes appeared between 1751 and 1757.

Noel Antoine
Pluche,
La m‚canique des langues et l'art de les assembler (The Way Languages Work and the Art of Assembling Them)

Treatise on the origin of languages.

Alexander
Pope,
The Collected Works of Alexander Pope

Edited by William Warburton and containing the now-famous quotation by Richard Bentley: “I hold it as certain, that no Man was ever written out of Reputation but by himself.”

Madeleine de
Puisieux,
Caracteres

De Puisieux’s second book. In the Preface she comments on her break with Diderot: “I have learned that five years of familiarity with people do not reveal the depths of their heart when they have some advantage in concealing it.”

Published in eleven volumes between 1752 and 1771. Volumes VII-XI comprised the Philosophical Works. Hume was not impressed: “Lord Bolingbroke’s posthumous Productions have at last convinc’d the whole World, that he ow’d his Character chiefly to his being a man of Quality, & to the Prevalence of Faction. Never were so many Volumes, containing so little Variety & Instruction: so much Arrogance & Declamation. The Clergy are all enrag’d against him; but they have no Reason. Were they never attack’d by more forcible Weapons than his, they might for ever keep Possession of their Authority.”

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'
Holbach,
A Letter to a Lady of a Certain Age

A pamphlet in which D’Holbach champions the Italians in the famous ‘Guerre des Bouffons’. The war was, ostensibly, over the respective merits of French and Italian music and was sparked by the visit to Paris of a touring Italian opera buffa company. Their programme open in August. Holbach's pamphlet supported the views expressed in Grimm's Petit ProphŠte and Rousseau's Lettre sur la musique fran‡aise.

David
Hume,
Political Discourses

Like the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume wrote the Political Discourses between 1749 and 1751 when he was staying with his brother at Ninewells. In "My Own Life" he wrote that it was his only work ?that was successful on the first publication. In 1758 the Political Discourses were published with the Essays Moral and Political (1741?1742) in a single volume entitled Essays Moral, Political and Literary. A French translation appeared in Amsterdam and a German translation in Hamburg in 1754.

David
Hume,
Scotticisms

A ist of Scotticisms, that is, words of Scottish origin and with distinctive Scottish meaning to be avoided in English prose. The work was published anonymously with no date or publisher.

William
Law,
The Way to Divine Knowledge

Charlotte
Lennox,
The Female Quixote

Jean-François
Marmontel,
Les Héraclides

John
Orrery,
Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jonathan Swift in a series of letters from John, Earl of Orrery to his son

Orrery was a friend of Swift, Pope, and Johnson. His Remarks were followed in 1754 by Dr. Delaney’s Observations upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks.

Jean-Jacques
Rousseau,
Le Devin du village

This operatic intermezzo won Rousseau immediate fame following its debut at Fontainebleau on 18 October 1752. Performed before Louis XV it was later emulated by both Gluck and Mozart.

Jean-Jacques
Rousseau,
Narcisse ou l’amant de lui-même

First played at the Théatre Français.

William
Smellie,
Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery

Smellie set up a school in London in the 1740s to teach male pupils midwifery. He designed obstetric forceps and with his pupils delivered more than a thousand poor women within a ten year period. Smellie's interventions were attacked by the London midwife Elizabeth Nihell, who had trained at the Paris H“tel-Dieu. In her Professed Midwife: A Man-Midwife or a Midwife? A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery (1760) Nihell railed against male midwives and their instruments, particularly Smellie with his ?delicate fist of a great horse-godmother of a he-midwife.?

Voltaire,
Am‚lie ou le duc de Foix

Voltaire,
D‚fense de milord Bolingbroke

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … M. le cardinal Quirini

Voltaire,
Epigramme sur la mort de M. d' Aube

Voltaire,
Questions sur l' Encyclopédie (F - L)

Voltaire,
Histoire du docteur Akakia et du natif de Saint-Malo

Voltaire,
Micromégas

This tale was inspired by Swift’s Gulliver, which Voltaire had read soon after his arrival in England in 1726. A first version was written in 1739 entitled Les Voyages du baron de Gangan.

Voltaire,
Compte rendu des OEuvres de Maupertuis

Voltaire,
Diatribe du docteur Akakia

A pamphlet published in November ridiculing the scientific pretensions of Maupertuis, who at the time was president of the Berlin Academy. Fredrick II consigned the work to the flames and condemned Voltaire in person. Voltaire left Prussia on 27 March 1753 and was soon arrested under orders from the king.

A short fantasy published in January, furthering the ‘guerre des bouffons’. Diderot published The Little Prophet in an effort to mediate between Grimm and the patriotic supporters of French music. The pamphlet was much admired by Voltaire and appeared in more that ten editions.

Jonas
Hanway,
An Account of British Trade

As a partner, with Charles Dingley, of the Russian Company, Hanway went to St. Petersburg in 1743 and traveled through Russia and Persia and returned to England via Germany and the Netherlands in 1750.

Eliza
Haywood,
History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy

Aaron
Hill,
The Works of Aaron Hill, Esq, in Four Volumes, Consisting of Letters on Various Subjects and Original Poems, Moral and Facetious.

William
Hogarth,
The Analysis of Beauty

David
Hume,
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects

A four-volume collection of Hume?s works consisting of Essays Moral and Political, Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and Political Discourses.

The Occasional Observations on Voltaire's ?Age of Louis XIV? was co-authored with La Beaumelle. Marchand became a critic of Voltaire because he felt Voltaire was too sloppy in his use of sources.

Jean-François
Marmontel,
Funérailles de Sésostris

Morelly,
Basiliade

Novel about a shipwreak.

Morelly,
Naufrage des iles flottantes

George
Psalmanazar,
Essays on the following subjects: I. On the reality and evidence of miracles, ? Written some years since, ? By an obscure layman in town

Psalmanazar, whose real name is not known, was born in France; he travelled round Europe posing as a Japanese conver to Christianity and was sent to England in 1702 as a Formosan convert. The Essay includes criticism of David Hume's ?Of Miracles? and ?Of a Particular Providence?.

Samuel
Richardson,
An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting; with Proper Rules for the Exercise of that Pleasant Art

Co-authored with Jane Collier.

Samuel
Richardson,
Sir Charles Grandison

A French translation appeared 1755.

Jean-Jacques
Rousseau,
Lettre sur la musique française

Published in November, the Lettre bitterly attacked French opera, French music and other aspects of French musical life. “French song is nothing but a continuous bark”. The orchestra of the Paris Opéra hanged Rousseau in effigy and refused him entry to their performances.

William
Smellie,
A Discourse on Charity

Tobias George
Smollett,
Ferdinand Count Fathom

Voltaire,
Annales de l' Empire

Voltaire,
Au roi de Prusse, en lui renvoyant la clef de chambellan

Voltaire,
Vers pour le portrait de M. d' Alembert

Voltaire,
Mémoire

Voltaire,
De la population de l' Am‚rique

Voltaire,
Examen du testament politique du cardinal Alberoni

Voltaire,
Supplément au Siècle de Louis XIV

Voltaire,
Vers de M. de Voltaire

Voltaire,
Mémoire contre La Beaumelle

Robert
Wallace,
A dissertation on the numbers of mankind, in antient and modern times: in which the superior populousness of antiquity is maintained: with an appendix, containing additional observations on the same subject, and some remarks on Mr. Hume?s Political discourse, Of the populousness of antient nations

Includes a critique of David Hume's ?Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations.?

Published between 1754 1756, a solution of the problem of the perturbations (variations of orbit) of the planets that d’Alembert had presented to the Berlin Academy a few years before.

Anonymous,
Admonitions from the dead, in epistles to the living; addressed by certain spirits of both sexes, to their friends or enemies on earth, with a view either to condemn or justify their conduct while alive; and to promote the cause of religion and moral virtue

Includes a fictitious letter from Bolingbroke written in the afterlife pleading with David Hume to abandon his infidelity.

Condillac was Locke’s French disciple. In the Traité Condillac gives an imaginary step-by-step account of the building up of a human being’s mental life from sense-impressions alone. Employing a fantasy, possibly borrowed from Diderot, he asks us to imagine a statue, endowed initially only with the sense of smell , and view its development as the various senses become fully equipped with all the mental faculties. The Traité was the most forthright defence of sensationalism in the 18th century.

Count Turpin de
Crisse,
Essai sur l'art de la guerre

Denis
Diderot,
Promenade du sceptique

Denis
Diderot,
Pensees sur l’interpretation de la nature

The Penseesappeared in January and was a revised version of De l’interpretation de la nature, which was published in November 1753. It consists of fifty-eight reflections, conjectures and questions concerning scientific method and specific scientific problems, in addition to an attack on the overweening pretensions of mathematics which was to open a rift between Diderot and d’Alembert. It was meant to be a theoretical supplement to the Encyclopédia.

Jonathan
Edwards,
Inquiry into Freedom of the Will

David
Fordyce,
The Elements of Moral Philosophy, in Three Books. 1. Of Man, and his Connexions .... 2. The principal Distinction of Duty or Virtue .... 3. Of Practical Ethics, of the Culture of the Mind ....

The Elements of Moral Philosophy first appeared in volume 2 of Robert Dodsley’s The Preceptor (1748), a do-it-yourself volume of all-purpose education for young people. It was so well received that it was soon reprinted separately, translated into French and German (both in 1757), and incorporated into the first volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771). Fordyce taught for some years at Doddridge’s dissenting academy at Northampton, and was later Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen.

Elie
Fréron,
L’ Année littéraire

Journal (1754-1776) founded and edited by Fréron in which, presenting a thorough survey of French literature, he attacked Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, evoking from Voltaire his famous rejoinders Le Pauvre diable and L’ Écossaise. Fréron was imprisoned at Vincennes in 1746, in the Bastille in 1757, and narrowly escaped a similar fate in 1765.

Thomas
Gray,
The Progress of Poesy

Written while Gray was living in Cambridge.

David
Hume,
The History of England from the Invasion of Caesar to the Revolution of 1688

Published in 6 vols. between 1754 and 1762. A French translation was begun in 1760 and in German in 1762. Upwards of 150 editions of the History appeared in the 19th century. Voltaire called it “perhaps the best ever written in any language. Mr. Hume, in his History, is neither parliamentarian, for royalist, nor Anglican, nor Presbyterian - he is simply judicial . . . (in this) new historian we find a mind superior to his materials; he speaks of weaknesses, blunders, cruelties as a physician speaks of epidemic diseases.” (Quoted in Mossner, Life of Hume, 318)

Immanuel
Kant,
The Question as to Whether the Earth is Growing Old, considered from the Angle of Physics

Immanuel
Kant,
Investigation of the Question as to Whether the Rotation of the Earth on its Axis Has Undergone Any Modification

John
Leland,
A view of the principal deistical writers that have appeared in England in the last and present century; with observations upon them, and some account of the answers that have been published against them

A historical and critical compendium in four volumes written after the deist controversy had passed its peak. Establishing the canon of deist writers, the work began with Lord Herbert (not known as a deist in his day) and moved through Hobbes (in later works usually dropped from the list), Blount, the earl of Shaftesbury, Collins, Woolston, Tindal, Morgan, Chubb, and Bolingbroke. Leland concluded his survey with a critique of Bolingbroke’s speculations which were posthumously published in 1754.

Owen
Manning,
An inquiry into the grounds and nature of the several species of ratiocination. In which the argument made use of in the philosophical essays of D. Hume, Esq; is occasionally taken notice of

From 1727 Reimarus was professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the Hamburg Gymnasium. In 1728 he married Johanne Friederike Fabricius and made his own house a meeting-place for learned and artistic societies. Between 1750 and 1752 he used materials collected by his father-in-law to a produce an edition of Dio Cassius writings.

The Treatise was Reimarus’s first major philosophical work. It contains a unified deistic system made up of three inter-related parts: the cosmological, biological-psychological and theological.

Robert
Wallace,
The Doctrine of Passive Obedience and Non Resistance Considered?

Wallace denied that universal moral rules could be grounded in the commands of a supreme being.

William
Warburton,
A View of Lord Bolingbroke?s Philosophy, in four letters to a friend

A defence of revealed religion.

John
Woolman,
Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes

Part II was published in 1762. Woolman was successful in getting Quaker communities to go on record against the institution of slavery and persuaded many individuals to free their slaves.

1755

Jean le Rond d'
Alembert,
Éloge de Montesquieu

The Éloge appeared as the preface to Volume V of the Encyclopédie and it presented Montesquieu as one of the Encyclopédie’s supporters. However, Montesquieu had, in fact, refused an invitation to write the articles ‘Democracy’ and ‘Despotism’, and the promised article on ‘Taste’ remained unfinished at his death.

“(We men) hardly acquire any new knowledge without undeceiving ourselves about some agreeable illusion, and our enlightenment is almost always at the expense of our pleasures. Our simple ancestors were perhaps moved more strongly by the monstrous plays of our old theatre than we are moved today by the finest of our dramas; nations less enlightened than ours are not less happy, for with fewer desires they also have fewer needs, and coarse or less refined pleasures are good enough for them. Still, we would not want to exchange our enlightenment for the ignorance of those nations, or for the ignorance of our ancestors. If this enlightenment does reduce our pleasure, it flatters our vanity at the same time; we congratulate ourselves on having become sophisticated, as though this is some sort of merit.”

Jean le Rond d'
Alembert,
Éloge de M. le Président de Montesquieu

An eulogy to Montesquieu published in Mélanges, II.

Thomas
Amory,
Memoirs, Containing Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain

British author of Irish descent, it is believed Amory lived in Dublin where he knew Swift. Later he lived in Westminster and Hounslow. He was a staunch Unitarian and a student of medicine, geology and antiquities. The Memoirs deal with the life of an imaginary lady, Mrs Marinda Benlow.

Anonymous,
A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth

Thomas
Church,
An Analysis of the Philosophical Works of Lord Bolingbroke, by the late unfortunate Earl Ferrers, for his private entertainment; To which is prefixed, a Parallel of Earl Ferrer’s Case, with that of Lord Santry, a Peer of Ireland, both convicted of murder: and a sentimental letter to a friend

First published anonymously in 1755. Thomas Church (1707-1756) was a diligent writer in defence of christianity; he criticised the philosophy of deism and the doctrines and practices of the methodists. His analysis of the works of Bolingbroke (who was stated to be his patron) is marked by considerable terseness and ingenuity of argument.

“Ideas come and go without order, forming only moving tableaux which offer bizarre and imperfect images. It is our needs which must lend them definite character again and place them in their true light”.

In the Treatise Condillac attacked Buffon and Descartes for their account of animals as mere automatons, devoid of cognitive powers.

Denis
Diderot,
The History and Secret of Painting in Wax

Diderot, ‘Droit naturel’, article in Volume Five of the Encyclopédie, published in November.

“It is evident that if man is not free...there will be neither moral good or evil, neither just nor unjust, neither obligation nor right.”

Abbé
Dubos,
Réflexions Critiques Sur La Poesie et Sur La Peinture

An author Burke criticises in A Philosophical Inquiry for preferring painting to poetry.

Leonhard
Euler,
Institution of Differential and Integral Calculus

The first analytical treatment of algebra, the theory of equations, trigonometry, and analytical geometry.

Early work in which Kant predicted the existence of the planet Uranus, later discovered by Herschel in 1881.

Immanuel
Kant,
A Brief Outline of Some Meditations on Fire

Immanuel
Kant,
A New Exposition of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge

Immanuel
Kant,
The True Measure of Forces

Doctoral thesis.

Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing,
Miss Sara Sampson

Translated in 1789 and known as the first tragedy of middleclass life in German drama and which marked a break with the French drama that dominated the German stage. The play was inspired by George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731) and by Richardson’s novels. It was performed successfully in Frankfurt an der Oder.

Mendelssohn was influenced by Shaftesbury and sought to ground aesthetics in psychology. ?Every rule of beauty is simultaneously a discovery in psychology.?

Moses
Mendelssohn,
Philosophische Gespräche (Philosophical Dialogues)

Mendelssohn’s first work, in praise of Leibniz, was published with the help of Lessing.

Morelly,
Le Code de la nature

An author for whom virtually every biographical detail is unknown. The first work of socialism in France, Morelly denounces property as the cause of all evil and lays down the principles and draws a detailed constitution for the good society.

Arthur
Murphy,
The Orphan of China

A tragedy which Murphy modelled on Voltaire's L'Orphelin de la Chine.

Charles
Palissot,
The Circle; or, the Originals

A stage burlesque, first staged in Luneville at the court-theatre of Stanislas Lescinzski, the Duke of Lorraine. Stanislas, sometime King of Poland, father to the present queen of France, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (1733-36) had been installed as titular ruler of Lorraine, now becoming to all intents a part of France. His court tended to be a focus of anti-philosophique sentiment. Palissot was a renegade from the philosophique camp. His play offended Stanislas and enraged d’Alembert.

Jean Philippe
Rameau,
Erreurs sur la musique

Rameau was a neo-classicist. He argued that a composer must use sound to evince harmony - eternal mathematical proportations emboided in the nature of things - not given to the mortal ear, but which give the pattern of musical sounds the order and beauty which the inspired artist creates or imitates.

The Erreurs include a violent attack on six articles on music Rousseau wrote for the Encyclopédie, (he wrote nearly 400, plus one on political economy). Rousseau wrote a rejoinder, the Examen de deux principes?.

Essay entered, unsuccessfully, for the Dijon competition. Completed in June 1754 and published in May 1755; trans. as A Discourse upon theOrigin and Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, 1762, and usually known as the Second Discourse.

Rousseau sent a copy to Voltaire, who replied, on 30 August 1755, “Sir, I have received you new book, written against the human race, and I thank you . . . Never was so much intelligence used to make us stupied. While reading it, one longs to go on all fours”.

Jonathan
Swift,
An Essay upon the Life and Character of Dr. Jonathan Swift

Lekain (originally Henri-Louis Cain, 1729-78), who Voltaire considered the greatest tragedian of his time, appeared in the title role of Genghis Khan. He made his debut at the Comédie-Française as Titus in Voltaire’s Brutus (1754); although ugly and harsh-voiced, he was extremely popular. He was also to appear inTancrède (1760). Lekain also introduced more realism into the theatre. L' Orphelin de la Chine was a great success when it was performed at the Comédie-Française in August 1755.

Voltaire,
A M***, sur les anecdotes

Voltaire,
A M. le président de Fleurieu

Voltaire,
A une jeune dame de Genève

Voltaire,
La Pucelle d’Orléans

A ‘most improper’ poem, which the booksellers printed in spite of Voltaire’s protests.

Voltaire,
Astrologie

Johann Joachim
Winckelmann,
Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks

After converting to Catholicism, Winckelmann moved to Rome where he became librarian to the cardinal-secretary of state and, in 1736, president of the collection of antiquities in the Vatican and Vatican librarian.

Winckelmann’s ideas became widely influential. In the Reflections he defined the essence of Greek art as ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘tranquil grandeur’.

1756

Thomas
Amory,
The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq

Published in 2 volumes 1756 and 1766, The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq is a work of fictional autobiography. The hero, “an old compound of a man,” marries seven wives in succession, each embodying one of his ideals of womanhood. At one stage in the book Amory reveals his deism: “the plain argument for the existence of a Deity, obvious to all, and carrying irresistible conviction with it, is from the evident contrivance and fitness of things to one another, which we met with through all the parts of the universe.” (The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esquire, ed. E. A. Baker, London, 1904, pp. 85-6).

Thomas
Birch,
An inquiry into the share, which King Charles I. had in the transactions of the Earl of Glamorgan, ? for bringing over a body of Irish rebels to assist that King, in the years 1645 and 1646. ? The second edition; to which is added an appendix, containing several letters of the King to the Earl of Glamorgan

The first edition was published in 1747; in the second edition Birch included criticism of Hume's account of the Irish Rebellion in his History.

Edmund
Burke,
A Vindication of Natural Society...in a Letter to Lord ***, by a Late Noble Writer

Published anonymously and in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, a satire directed against the destructive criticism of revealed religion and the contemporary vogue of a ‘return to Nature’.

Denis
Diderot,
Lettre a Landois

Landois, a little-known playright, sent Diderot a manuscript on morality and Diderot wrote a reply, in which he outlined the basic principles of his philosophy. It was published in the Correspondance littéraire, 1 July.

Immanuel
Kant,
History and Natural Description of the Earthquake of 1755

Immanuel
Kant,
The Use of Metaphysics in Combination with Geometry in Natural Philosophy

Immanuel
Kant,
Some Remarks towards Elucidation of the Theory of the Winds

Daniel
MacQueen,
Letters on Mr. Hume’s History of Great Britain

Published in Edinburgh, MacQueen provides one of the earliest reponses to Hume’s History of Great Britain (later The History of England.) Hume amended two passages after the first edition of the work was published, and MacQueen’s criticism may have been responsible for this.

Victor Riqueti de
Mirabeau,
L’ami des hommes ou traité sur la population (The Friendship of Men, or a Treatise on Population)

Published in 5 volumes, a work that was widely read although largely a plagiarism of the Essai sur la nature du commerce en général (1755), written by Richard Cantillon, an English banker in Paris. Though not strictly speaking a part of Physiocratic literature, it did create a sensation. Voltaire hated Mirabeau and charged him with “breathing a leper on the human race”.

Arthur
Murphy,
An Englishman from Paris

Arthur
Murphy,
The Apprentice

Drury Lane farce for which Murphy earnt œ800.

Thomas
Percy,
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

Published in 3 volumes.) Described as “the most knowledgeable man of his age”, Percy had many friends who assisted his scholarly interests. Johnson encouraged Percy to edit the Reliques and praised his “minute accuracy of enquiry”, William Shenstone helped with the planning of the work and Thomas Warton searched Oxford libraries for comparative texts.

Percy “made the poetry of popular tradition accessible to educated readers and so transmitted its strength and simplicity to the early Romantic poets. Based on a tattered manuscript (known as the Percy Folio), itself a collection of earlier poems written down early in the 15th century, and, when Percy found it in a friend’s house, about to be used to light a fire, the Reliques incorporated many ballads, songs, and medieval romances supplied by friends who, at Percy’s request, ‘rommaged’ in libraries, attics, and warehouses for manuscripts and early editions. The judgement with which it is edited, despite some sacrifice of authenticity to readability, influenced concern for original sources and collation of texts.” (Encyclopædia Britannica)

Hermann Samuel
Reimarus,
Vernunftlehre . . . (Doctrine of Reason)

Jean-Jacques
Rousseau,
Lettre sur la providence

Unpublished manuscript, dated 18 August 1756, in which Rousseau argued against Voltaire’s rejection of a beneficent providence.

Jean-Jacques
Rousseau,
Lettre sur la musique fran‡aise

Rousseau's infamous attack on French music was seen as a direct criticism of Rameau's operas.

Marshal Maurice de
Saxe,
Mes rˆveries (Reveries on the Art of War)

?War is a science covered with shadows in whose obscurity one cannot move with an assured step. Routine and prejudice, the natural result of ignorance, are its foundation and support. All sciences have principles and rules; war has none.?

J.P.
Sussmilch,
Versuch eines Beweises

Written in 1756 but first published in 1766. Sussmilch led an army of Christian theologians, claiming that language was a gift of divine grace.

Voltaire,
De la nation fran‡aise

Voltaire,
De Socrate

Voltaire,
Sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Voltaire,
Les Deux consol‚s

Voltaire,
Au roi de Prusse ['O Salomon du Nord, “ philosophe roi' ]

Voltaire,
De l' imagination

Voltaire,
Des g‚nies

Voltaire,
A M. le comte de ***, au sujet de l' imp‚ratrice-reine

Voltaire,
Sur Newton et Descartes

Voltaire,
Articles pour l' Encyclopédie

Voltaire,
Lettre sur le Dante

Voltaire,
Pour M. et Mme de Montpéroux

Voltaire,
Lettre de M. de Voltaire aux éditeurs

Voltaire,
De Constantin

Voltaire,
Essai sur les moeurs et l?esprit des nations

Voltaire,
De Julien

Voltaire,
Des poss‚d‚s

Voltaire,
Dialogues entre LucrŠce et Posidonius

Voltaire,
Du siŠcle de Constantin

Voltaire,
Histoire des voyages de Scarmentado

Voltaire,
Des langues

Voltaire,
D' Ovide

Voltaire,
De la magie

Voltaire,
Songe de Platon

Short story in which Voltaire imagines that while God himself is perfect, he left the creation of the world to a lesser angel who made a poor job of it; hence the prevalence of evil.

Published in February, Voltaire’s long poem on the Lisbon earthquake which occurring on the morning of All Saints’ Day in 1755, killed an estimated 50,000. Voltaire first heard about the earthquake with certainty on 23rd November, by the first week in December he had completed his poem, consisting of a preface and 234 alexandrine verses. “I had to say what I thought and say it in a way that would revolt neither overly philosophical nor overly credulous spirits”. Letter to Cideville, 12 April, 1756.

In August, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire defending his faith in reply to the poem on the earthquake: “All the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt for a moment the immortality of the soul of a beneficent Providence. I feel it, I believe it, I want it, I hope for it, and I shall defend it to my last breath.”

Voltaire,
Des juifs

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … l' empereur Fran‡ois Ier

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … M. le duc de Richelieu, sur la conquˆte de Mahon

Voltaire,
A M. Desmahis

Voltaire,
A M. Sénec de Meilhan

Isaac
Ware,
A Complete Body of Architecture

1757

John
Brown,
An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times

A bitter satire on the ostentatious luxury of the age which became extremely popular.

Edmund
Burke,
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

A second edition was published in 1759 with an additional Preface and an new Introduction on Taste.

The sublime is “a sort of delight full of terror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror...The sense of the sublime...releases the individual from a thousand ties to which he is subject as a member of the community and of the social and civil order. In the experience of the sublime all these barriers vanish; the individual must stand entirely on his own feet and assert himself in his independence and originality against the universe, both physical and social...The beautiful unites, the sublime isolates; the one civilizes by teaching the proper forms of social intercourse and by refining morals, the other penetrates to the depths of our being and reveals these depths to us for the first time”. (Cassirer)

Denis
Diderot,
Le Fils naturel

This play was published together with its theoretical supplement, Entretiens sur Fils naturel. The Entretiens consists of three discussions about the play between Diderot and Dorval, the leading character. The play itself, subtitled, The trials of virtue, centres on the conflict between friendship and love experienced by Dorval.

Act IV, scene 3 contains the line which, following his self-imposed isolation, infuriated Rousseau,: “Interrogate your heart: it will tell you that the good man is in society, and that only the bad man is alone”.

“Certainly there are still barbarians. When won’t there be? But the time of barbarism is past. The century has become enlightened. Reason has grown refined, and the nation’s books are filled with its precepts. The books that inspire benevolence in men are practically the only ones read.”

Denis
Diderot,
Encyclopédia

Volume VII of the Encyclopédia appeared in October. It included d’Alembert’s article ‘Genèva’. Written after d’Alembert visited Voltaire at Les Délices in August 1756, it enraged Genevan authorities with its suggestion that they abandon their opposition to the theatre and allow dramatic presentations to educate their sensibilities. It also caused considerable comment with its unwelcome praise of the Genevan pastors for their learning, morals and advance views and for the fact that “some of them no longer believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ”. The Genevan government appointed a committee under the chairmanship of Voltaire’s friend and physician to refute d’Alembert’s description of their religious views and practices.

Both Diderot and, later Rousseau, thought that Voltaire was responsible for the remarks on the theatre; it was well known that the Genevan authorities had tried to prevent Voltaire from staging private theatricals on their territory.

John
Dyer,
The Fleece

Johann Christoph
Gottsched,
Grundlegung einer deutschen Sprachkunst (Necessary Provisions for a History of German Dramatic Poetry)

Albrecht von
Haller,
Elementa physiologiae corporis humanae

Published in 8 volumes between 1757 and 1766.

Jonas
Hanway,
A Journal of Eight Days' Journey

This was the second edition published in 2 volumes in 1757.

David
Hume,
Four Dissertations, (The Natural History of Religion, Of the Passions, Of Tragedy, Of the Standard of Taste)

The Four Dissertations originally contained five essays: (1) ?The Natural History of Religion,? (2) ?Of the Passions,? (3) ?Of Tragedy,? (4) ?Of Suicide,? (5) ?Of the Immortality of the Soul.? The controversy surrounding the last two essays prompted the publisher to removed them from the first edition. Hume replaced them with ?Of the Standard of Taste? and the work was republished as the Four Dissertations. Two sections in the "National History of Religion" were also made. Pirated versions of the two essays appeared in 1770, 1777 and 1783.

Hume did not rate this work, although it contained a rewriting of book 2 of the Treatise, thus concluding Hume’s restatement of that early work.

Bishop Warburton claimed that the design of the Natural History was “to establish naturalism, a species of atheism”, and to teach Bolingbroke’s atheism“ without Bolingbroke’s abusive language”. (Mossner, Life of Hume, 325)

“Of the Standard of Taste” is “a landmark of Enlightement thought”, it “attempts what the Enlightenment at its best always attempted: to substitute the authentic if relative certainty of experience for the absolute but spurious certainty of metaphysics or tradition.” (Gay, vol. II, 306)

Charles
Montesquieu,
Essai sur le Goût

The article ‘Goût’ appeared in the Encyclopédia, two years after Montesquieu’s death, but its origins go back to the 1720’s when Montesquieu was concerned with aesthetic ideas of Dubos. According to Montesquieu, “the sources of the beautiful, the good, the agreeable” are “in us”. Taste, which is subjective, is the “measure” of the pleasures that men experience. “Our manner of being is wholly arbitrary; we could have been made as we were, or differently. But if we had been made differently, we would see differently; one organ more or less in our machine would have given us another kind of eloquence, another poetry; a different structure of the same organs would have produced still another poetry: for instance, if the constitution of our organs had made us capable of longer attention, all the rules which proportion the disposition of the subject to the measure of attention would disappear.”

Arthur
Murphy,
The Upholsterer, or What News?

A farce about tradesmen getting mixed up in the world of politics.

Charles
Palissot,
Petites lettres sur les grands philosophes

Includes harsh criticism of Diderot’s theory of le drame. The Letters attacked the encyclopédistes for ‘servilely’ following Bacon, mocked their sensitivity to criticism, and rounded on d’Alembert for accepting a pension from France’s enemy, Fredrick the Great.

Tobias George
Smollett,
A Complete History of England, Deduced from the Descent of Julius Caesar to the Treaty of Aix La Chapelle, 1748

Published in four volumes between 1757 and 1758, Smollett’s Continuation of the Complete History of England appeared in five volumes between 1760 and 1765.

John
Curry,
Historical Memoirs of the Irish Rebellion in the Year 1641

Denis
Diderot,
Le Pére de famille

This play was published in November together with its theoretical supplement, Discours sur la poesie dramatique. It played successfully in several French cities and in Baden and Hamburg, but when it reached the Parisian stage in February 1761, it ran for only six performances. In the essay Diderot expounded his programme for a new drama: a theatre or truth and Nature, related, in its use of pantomine and tableau, to the art of painting. Both the play and the essay represented an attack on the Commedie Française.

Robert
Dodsley,
Cleone

A domestic tragedy, in which the heroine was falsely suspected of infidelity to her husband and her son. The play had a long run at Covent Garden. 2,000 copies of the play were sold on the day or publication.

Louise-Florence-Pétronille de la Live
Épinay,
Mess moments heureux

With encouragement from Voltaire, this was Mme d’Épinay’s first published book. Printed anonymously with a run of only twenty-five copies, it is not known where they were sent. It consists of a miscellany of verse, essays and letters, dedicated to her mother and including her self-portrait and the “Letter to my daughter’s governess”. The dedicatory pages are clearly addressed to Grimm; “you have guided my pen, now guide as well the responses of my friends, to whom alone I offer this book”.

Goguet,
Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences

Françoise de
Graffigny,
La fille d'Aristide

Graffigny's second play, Aristide's Daughter was performed at the Com‚die Fran‡aise in May and failed miserably.

Johann Georg
Hamann,
Biblische Betrachtungen eines Christen

William
Harris,
An Historical and Critical Account of the Life and Writings of Charles I, King of Great Britain. After the Manner of Bayle, drawn from Original Writers and State-Papers

With extensive criticism of Hume’s History of England. “And does Mr. Hume really think it probable that Charles's youth and inexperience led him into an error, and made him swallow all the gross falsities of Buckingham? This, indeed, is vindicating his honesty at the expence of his understanding; but at the same time is such a way of vindicating it, as very few will approve.” (page 74.)

Claude Adrien
Helvétius,
De l’esprit

In this work Helvétius set out to prove that sensation is the source of all intellectual activity. It arroused considerable opposition, especially from the dauphine Louis, son of Louis XV. Although meeting with the approval of the royal censor (who was then fired), the work was denounced by the Sorbonne, the parlement, the Attorney General and the Pope himself. Along with other philosophical works, including Voltaire’s innocuous Poème sur la loi naturelle (1756), it was burnt, in spite of Helvétius’s three retractions, by the public hangman in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. It was, however, translated into several European languages.

Voltaire claimed De l’esprit was full of commonplaces and that anything in it that was original was false and Rousseau declared that the benevolence of the author gave the lie to his principles.

“From Locke’s sensationalism and La Mettrie’s materialism Helvétius constructed a picture of man that is stark in its simplicity; even tough-minded contemporaries found his almost gloating insistence on universal, unrelieved egotism a little repulsive. Men, Helvétius argues, are the recipients of sensations and the centres of passion. Thus equipped, each man acts to realize his desires in the world by following his self-interest with a kind of iron consistency. This is a profoundly pessimistic view of man’s nature, but it is relieved by Helvétius’s optimistic view of man’s possibilities. What man thinks, believes, even what he feels, is open to the most extensive modifications through the social environment - man, in other words, can be educated to be almost anything, even a good citizen.” (Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. II, 513)

Men’s education, taking the word “in its true and more extensive signification”, differed far more than their schooling did, hence the vast differences among them. “I say, no one receives the same education . . . Everyone, if I may put this way, has for his preceptors the form of government under which he lives, his friends, his mistresses, the men by whom his is surrounded, his reading, and, finally, chance, that is to say, an infinite number of events whose causes and connections our ignorance does not permit us to perceive.” Only the responsible legislator can recognize that the sciences of legislation and of education are one and the same. “It is solely through good laws that one can form virtuous men. Thus the whole art of the legislator consists of forcing men, by the sentiment of self-love, to be always just to one another.” Obviously, “to make such laws one must know the human heart, and to know first of all that men, responsive to themselves, indifferent to others, are born neither good nor bad, but ready to be the one or the other.”

Henry
Home,
Historical Law Tracts

David
Hume,
Essays Moral, Political and Literary

A volume combining two earlier works: Essays Moral and Political (1758) and Political Discourses (1752). Hume revised the content of the work in subsequent editions.

Francis
Hutcheson,
Thoughts on Laughter, and Observations on the Fable of the Bees

Immanuel
Kant,
A New Doctrine of Rest and Motion and its Implications for Natural Science

Robert
Lowth,
Author of Life of William of Wykeham

Lowth was Professor of poetry at Oxford (1741-50), Bishop of Oxford (1766-77), of London (1777) and dean of Chapel Royal (1777).

The Historical Dictionary, or Critical and Literary Memoires Concerning the Life and Works of Many Persons Particularly Distinguished in the Republic of Letters was published in the Hague between 1758 and 1759; it formed a biographical compendium to Bayle's Dictionnaire.

Richard
Price,
A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals, Particularly those respecting the Origin of our Ideas of Virtue, its Nature, Relation to the Deity, Obligation, Subject-Matter, and Sanctions (enlarged in 1787 by an Appendix, with additional notes and a Dissertation on the Being and Attributes of the Deity)

Price’s first work, which established his reputation, consisting of an attack on the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson and a forceful exposition of ethical intutionism. Price’s moral philosophy foreshadowed some of the fundamental ideas of Kant.

François
Quesnay,
Tableau économique

Quesnay main work which demonstrated the economic relationship between industry and agriculture, and containing the purported proof that agriculture alone added to the nation’s wealth. It contained the first example of an economic model. Quesnay feared that the wide circulation of the book might bring about a revolution.

Voltaire dismissed the utopianism of the Physiocrats who “finding themselves at leisure, they govern the state from the corner of their hearth” (L’Homme aux quarante écus), and Adam Smith thought the Tableau économique the work of a “very speculative physician” bent on prescribing a rigid diet to a country that did not need it. Hume was also dismissive; in a letter to Morellet, who was proposing to write a Dictionnaire de commerce, he wrote “I hope that in your work you will thunder against them, and crush them, and pound them, and reduce them to dust and ashes! They are, indeed, the set of men the most chimerical and most arrogant that now exist, since the annihilation of the Sorbonne.” (10 July 1769)

Jean-Jacques
Rousseau,
Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles

More commonly known as the Lettre sur les spectacles, a refutation of d’Alembert’s article ‘Genéve’ in the Encyclopédia. In the proofs of his Letter on Stage-Performances he added a paragraph to the Preface, in which he refers to his break with Diderot, (without mentioning him by name): “Living alone I had no one to show it to. I used to have a severe and judicious Aristarchus (i.e. critic); I have him no longer, and I do not want him any longer; but I shall never cease to regret him, and he is even more a loss to my heart than to my writings.”

Voltaire had inspired the article which d’Alembert had written after a visit to Les Délices; not only was the city of Calvin asked to build a theatre but also certain of its pastors were praised for their doubts of Christ’s divinity. The scandal provoked a hasty response: the Encyclopédie was forced to interrupt publication and Rousseau’s refutation marked a final break between himself and Voltaire. The prohibition of further publication of the Encyclopédie coincided with the crisis occasioned by an attempt on the life of the King.

The Lettre included one of Rousseau’s more notorious remarks on women: “In general, women like and appreciate no art and have no genius. They can succeed in small works that need only lightness of touch, thought and taste, and sometimes philosophy and reason . . . Their writings are as cold and pretty as they are themselves, and contain as much wit as you like, but never a soul. They do not know how to describe or to feel the sentiment of love.”

D’Alembert replied to the Lettre with the Lettre à J.J. Rousseau, citoyen de Genève.

“Everything, from the principles of secular science to the basis of the Revelation, from metaphysics to questions of taste . . . has been discussed, analyzed, debated.”

Edmund
Burke,
The Annual Register

A yearly survey of world affairs, which Burke in agreement with the publisher Robert Dodsley edited, without acknowledgement, for about thirty years.

Louis-Antoine
Caraccioli,
Le v‚ritable mentor (The True Mentor)

Denis
Diderot,
Salon

Diderot writes his first Salon in 1759.

Louise-Florence-Pétronille de la Live
Épinay,
Lettres … mon fils

Printed anonymously with a run of twenty-five, although in a letter to the author Voltaire remarked that pirated copies were circulating. It is work of striking candour, showing a well-founded pessimism concerning her son’s future.

Alexander
Gerard,
An Essay on Taste. With Three Dissertations on the same Subject, by Mr. De Voltaire, Mr. D’Alembert, F.R.S., Mr. De Montesquieu

In 1755, the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture proposed to award a gold medal for the best essay submitted to them on the subject of taste. With David Hume acting as one of the judges, the first medal was awarded in 1756 to Gerard, who later enjoyed Hume’s co-operation in having the work published.

Oliver
Goldsmith,
A Description of the Manner and Customs of the Native Irish

Oliver
Goldsmith,
An Enquiry Into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe

According to Hamann, Socrates reveals a truth ‘hidden in darkness’, accessible only through faith and sensibility.

David
Hume,
Letter to Critical Review

Letter in which Hume praises William Wilkie's The Epigoniad which appeared in 1757 in Edinburgh. Hume persuaded Andrew Millar to publish a second edition in London in 1759.

David
Hume,
The History of England, under the House of Tudor. Comprehending the Reigns of K. Henry VII, K. Henry VIII, K. Edward VI, Q. Mary, and Q. Elizabeth

Richard
Hurd,
Moral and Political Dialogues: being the substance of several conversations between divers eminent persons of the past and present age; digested by the parties themselves, and now first published from the original MSS with critical and explanatory notes by the Editor

Dialogue I. On Sincerity in the Commerce of the World: between Dr. Henry More and Edmund Waller. Dialogue II. On Retirement: between Mr. Abraham Cowley, and the Rev. Mr. Thomas Sprat. Dialogues III & IV. On the Golden Age of Queen Elisabeth: between the Hon. Robert Digby, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Mr. Addison. Dialogues V & VI. On the Constitution of the English Government. Sir John Maynard, Mr. Somers, Bishop Burnet. Includes a 7 page Postscript criticising Hume’s The History of England, under the House of Tudor, which was omitted from the second edition. “For it is to be noted, that the method observed by him in these histories is as singular as his view in composing them. For having undertaken to conjure up the spirit of absolute power, he judged it necessary to the charm, to reverse the order of things, and to evoke this frightful specture by writing (as witches use to say their prayers) backwards.”

After preaching at Whitehall (1750, on the suggestion of Warburton), Lincoln’s Inn (1765, where he gave the first Warburton lectures in 1768), Hurd became archdeacon Gloucester (1767), Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry (1774-81) and of Worcester (1781-1808). Following the text of Bentley, he edited Horaces’s Ars Poetica (1749) and the Epistola ad Augustum (1751), with commentaries, copious notes and “A Discourse Concerning Poetical Imitation”. He went on to edit the works of Warburton (7 vols., 1788; “A Discourse by Way of General Preface”, 1794), the Select Works of Cowley (1772) and he left materials for an edition of Addison (6 vols., 1811).

Journal founded by Lessing, Mendelssohn and Nicolai, which ran until 1765. In was here that Lessing insisted that Shakespeare would be a better model for German dramatists that the classical French dramatists.

Victor Riqueti de
Mirabeau,
Explication du Tableau économique

An exposition of Quesnay’s major work.

Carl Friedrich von
Moser,
Der Herr und der Diener (Lord and Servant)

A treatise in praise of enlightened despotism which was attacked by his friend Hamann.

Issac
Newton,
Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematical

French translation with commentary which Châtelet begun in 1745. It was completed in 1749 during her pregnancy with the marquis de Saint-Lambert. After her death in childbirth, her friend Alexis-Claude Clairaut published the work in 1759. It has remained the standard French edition of the Principia.

William
Robertson,
The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and King James VI

Robertsons first work, published in 2 volumes, proved to be extremely popular.

Adam
Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Translated into French in 1798 by Condorcet’s wife, Sophie de Grouchy (a sister of Emmanuel de Grouchy, the future marshal), with her own Huit lettres sur la sympathie as an appendix.

“The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence, may be said to be perfectly virtuous. But the most perfect knowledge of those rules will not alone enable him to act in this manner; his own passions are very apt to mislead him - sometimes to drive him, and sometimes to seduce him, to violate all the rules which he himself, in all his sober and cool hours, approves of.”

Voltaire,
Extraits de plusieurs morceaux

Voltaire,
Mémoire sur le libelle

Voltaire,
Historie de l’empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand

A work which Voltaire published between 1759 and 1763 to ingratiate himself with the Russian court, “a collection of gross compliments disguised as history” (Gay), d’Alembert said the book made him want to vomit. An English translation appeared in 1763.

An translation was published in 1759 under the title Candide, or All for the Best.

Voltaire denied authorship of Candide and called it ‘une coionnerie’ (in effect, “a load of all balls”). Written in 1758, it was published simultaneously in Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam, London and Brussels on 22 February. Cramer, its Genevan publisher, printed an initial run of 2,000 copies, the usual number for a work expected to sell well: within a month, after further printings and pirated editions, at least 20,000 copies had been sold, an astonishing figure for a work of fiction in the mid-eighteenth century, over three times the sales of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in a similar period. The first English translation, by a graduate of Jesus College, Oxford, came out within six weeks and sold at least 6,000 copies. In 1759 it appeared in eight editions.

Voltaire,
Précis du Cantique des cantiques

Voltaire,
Entretiens d' un sauvage et d' un bachelier

Voltaire,
Ode sur la mort de S. A. S. Mme la princesse de Bareith

Voltaire,
Histoire d' un bon bramin

Voltaire,
Epigramme sur Gresset

Voltaire,
Précis de l' Ecclésiaste

Voltaire,
Histoire de l' empire de Russie

Voltaire,
Des all‚gories

Voltaire,
Socrate

Voltaire,
Impromptu … M. de ChenneviŠres

Voltaire,
Relation de la mort du jésuite Berthier

Edward
Young,
Conjectures on Original Composition

An influential essay on the nature of artistic genius, on the free and creative impulse that defies all rules, struck a resonant chord within Germany and marked an important stage in the development of pre-romantic literary theory.